Buzz
Back in the day, I bet quite a few of us dared to dream of conquering the sky. Up close, it's about conquering the blue sky with airplanes. Further away, it's about exploring what awaits beyond our green planet. The first one is a rare achievement in real life, while the second one is probably impossible for 99.99% of dreamers of space conquest.
So, we have the gaming world to temporarily forget about reality. Airplanes are easy. We have Flight Simulator, World of Warplanes, and for the hardcore enthusiasts, there's DCS, Digital Combat Simulator. But exploring space, freely finding new lands, the quantity is too low, and the quality is not up to expectations.
No Man's Sky took a few years to become what it is today. Star Citizen, holding a pile of player-contributed Kickstarter money, remains silent and unfinished. Elite Dangerous focuses more on combat than exploration. So, our only hope now lies in a single masterpiece, set to release on 6/9/2023: Starfield. It's my most anticipated game this year, no other name comes close.
The ambitions of Starfield are vividly described in a 45-minute clip, giving a comprehensive overview of what you can do in the latest adventure from Todd Howard, the mastermind behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. These new gameplay details were shared right after the Xbox Games Showcase livestream event on the morning of 12/6 in Vietnam time:
The number of planets is in the thousands
Let's delve into the game's artistic style, what Bethesda Game Studio calls 'NASA punk.' Instead of overly fantastical visuals like the rugged style of Star Wars or the futuristic vibe of Star Trek, NASA punk combines extremely familiar shapes, just like what you see in current spaceships or international space stations, with features and details of science fiction. The result is equipment that looks very close, balancing architectural beauty and design advantages in terms of weight, focusing on practicality rather than aesthetics.
And these spacecraft, both familiar and imaginative, will take you to explore the world of Starfield, with a scale of over 1,000 planets across galaxies.
Of course, due to project limitations, not every planet will have main story missions or side quests for you to explore. However, each planet will be an ecosystem, including various flora and fauna suitable for the environmental nature of those planets. Furthermore, the lighting effects of each planet will also depend on the central star, and whether the planet has an atmosphere or not.
Starfield's technology will generate each planet from a total of thousands of choices using a basic framework, assembling terrain pieces together. This means that while they are both planets, the terrain and map between two game copies will be different. Bethesda will blend 'computer-generated procedurally generated content' with 'human-crafted content' to shape the player's experience.
On each planet, players can establish their own base for automated resource extraction, contributing to upgrading their spacecraft for exploring more distant places.True role-playing, both for the character and the spacecraft
Speaking of spaceships, they are the most crucial tools for exploring planets in galaxies hundreds of light-years away from the solar system. Futuristic technology, folding space to create jumps from one galaxy to another, is applied. Modular spacecraft will allow you to upgrade comprehensively according to your needs and preferences.
This upgrading capability is similar to skill trees for the main character you control. Skills, combat, or supporting technologies like jetpacks can all be unlocked, and then leveled up each time you advance. Instead of the 7 abbreviated SPECIAL stats in Fallout, in Starfield, you'll have 5 upgrade aspects: Physical, Social, Combat, Science, and Tech.
Once you have your preferred spacecraft, you'll assemble a crew for the ship, from teammates to a cheerful companion robot. Depending on your playstyle, you can choose companions with different stats to complement the main character, as well as your preferred approach, whether it's exploration or conquest.
However, there are always friendly individuals, even inviting you to their ship for dinner. All combined, creating a multi-dimensional and captivating gaming world, most importantly, realistic.
From piloting your ship, exploring space, engaging in combat, making new friends, completing missions, or simply the character upgrade mechanism, Starfield promises to create a perfect simulation game embodying the role of an astronaut exploring the universe.The storyline is enticing, but does it seem a bit like Skyrim?
The game is set in 2330, two decades after the conflict between two entities in the game, United Colonies and Freestar Collective. One fights for expanding territories in space, while the other fights for freedom. As for you, your character will start with the organization Constellation, true space explorers, a neutral organization.
Similar to Fallout or Skyrim, the main storyline and various quests in Starfield will allow you to lean towards one of the two mentioned entities. The game's storyline will be related to objects believed to belong to a completely different civilization, far beyond what humans have in the 24th century, in other words, the greatest mystery in human history.
The storyline of the 'unidentified object' seems quite similar to the Dragonborn's power story in Skyrim, as well as the Dragonborn's journey to discover the origin of their power. Similarly, Fallout 4 also revolves around a similar mystery, where the in-game parent searches for their child, only to discover that their child is now the leader of a powerful organization with ambitions to transform the post-nuclear war Earth into a new land for humanity.
Understanding Bethesda Game Studio's approach to game development, it's certain that Starfield will have the necessary depth. The question is whether they will fully harness the potential of a world with thousands of planets, not just creating a simple open-world map like previous games, to deliver an epic-scale journey or not.
